Saturday, March 26, 2011

No longer can the Family Court be called a Kangaroo Court after the Christchurch earthquake. It is now known as the Quake Court where dads are broken down by a callous court of liars! The Family Court is feminist evil. I can prove it! Custody issues are a sick joke for a jolted father. The gender bias court of lies don't give a toss about any rights of a man in custody issues. No wonder forced male clients of this court are killing themselves in large numbers. You have blood on your hands Boshier you sick unit!

Sunday, March 20, 2011

A truthful article on such a sad subject. When will the fractured family business come to accept the absurd no fault divorce farce causes the premature death of children? Pity judges didn't think of children and fathers as nothing more than pathetic file numbers in a evil Family Court saturated with deceit and lies! No wonder forced male clients of this nasty-corrupt court of lies take the suicide is painless option! I wonder how many kids die this year because of insane divorce laws orchestrated by malicious feminist ideology's that direct this terrible court system? Hey judge how many shafted fathers will kill themselves this year?

In an eight-decade study, parental divorce in childhood was the strongest predictor of early death in adulthood.

By Laura Landro

What can 1,500 Americans born a century ago, most of them long dead, tell us about the secret to a long life? Plenty, according to Howard S. Friedman and Leslie R. Martin, two psychologists who, in "The Longevity Project," mine an eight-decade research effort for answers to the kinds of questions that sent Ponce de León searching for the Fountain of Youth.

There are no magic potions on offer here, but many of the findings are provocative. The best childhood predictor of longevity, it turns out, is a quality best defined as conscientiousness: "the often complex pattern of persistence, prudence, hard work, close involvement with friends and communities" that produces a well-organized person who is "somewhat obsessive and not at all carefree."

The study was initiated in 1921 by Stanford University psychologist Lewis Terman, who asked San Francisco teachers to pick out their brightest students - most were about 10 years old - to help him try to identify early glimmers of high potential. Terman was most interested in intellectual achievement (his revision of Alfred Binet's intelligence scale produced the Stanford-Binet IQ test), but his interviews were so detailed that the results could be used as a basis for studying the respondents' lives in follow-up interviews across the years. Terman himself died in 1956, just shy of 80; after his death his work was picked up by others, with Mr. Friedman and Ms. Martin launching their portion of the project in 1990.

The study's participants, dubbed Terman's Termites, were bright students, but having a high IQ didn't seem to play a direct role in longevity. Neither did going on to an advanced degree. The authors suggest that persistence and the ability to navigate life's challenges were better predictors of longevity.

Some of the findings in "The Longevity Project" are surprising, others are troubling. Cheerful children, alas, turned out to be shorter-lived than their more sober classmates. The early death of a parent had no measurable effect on children's life spans or mortality risk, but the long-term health effects of broken families were often devastating. Parental divorce during childhood emerged as the single strongest predictor of early death in adulthood. The grown children of divorced parents died almost five years earlier, on average, than children from intact families. The causes of death ranged from accidents and violence to cancer, heart attack and stroke. Parental break-ups remain, the authors say, among the most traumatic and harmful events for children.

"The Longevity Project" is short on actual statistics, asserting instead broad trends among its study subjects and leaving readers to search through footnotes and then track down published studies if they want to learn more. With its relatively small sample and retrospective design, it hardly reaches the level of large population-based scientific investigations like the Framingham Heart Study, which followed thousands of participants for decades to identify common factors that contribute to cardiovascular disease, or the Women's Health Study, a 10-year randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study of nearly 40,000 women age 45 and older.

Mr. Friedman and Ms. Martin do claim to have used accepted scientific-validation methods to confirm that their findings can be extrapolated for a general understanding of health and longevity. But their results are based mostly on sifting participants' self-reported data, with death certificates providing the only verifiable information: age and cause of death. Data on factors like genetic predisposition to disease weren't gathered.

Moreover, the study's subjects lived most of their lives in a dramatically different time, before AIDS threatened longevity and before medical advances such as angioplasty and the development of cholesterol drugs came along to improve life-span. The respondents were almost uniformly white children from middle-class families, so the results don't tell us much about the longevity of other groups. And many of the girl students did not go on to have careers, so "The Longevity Project" focuses on men when it discusses workplace matters and their role in long-term health.

The book offers quizzes so that readers can assess various qualities - such as sociability, neuroticism and the tendency to "catastrophize" - and compare the results with those of Terman's Termites. The respondents to the study who fared best in the longevity sweepstakes tended to have a fairly high level of physical activity, a habit of giving back to the community, a thriving and long-running career, and a healthy marriage and family life. They summoned resilience against reverses and challenges - including divorce, loss of a spouse, career upsets and war trauma. By contrast, those with the darkest dispositions - catastrophizers, who viewed every stumble as a calamity - were most likely to die sooner. (The book doesn't say by what margin; a study published in 1998 reported that men in the Terman group were 25% more likely to die by age 65 if they were catastrophizers.)

And what about those cheerful, relatively doomed kids? The authors tell us that, later in life, such children would be more likely than their peers to throw caution to the wind when it came to life-shortening habits like smoking, drinking and driving fast cars. The chipper types were also more likely to die from homicide, suicide or accident. Of course, the authors don't suggest telling happy kids to wipe the grins off their faces, but Mr. Friedman and Ms. Martin do make a case for instilling values such as forethought and purposefulness. Indeed, "The Longevity Project" is not just an exercise in numbers-crunching; its larger aim seems to be to improve public health by encouraging a society with more goal-oriented and conscientious citizens. Now that's a long-term project.

Saturday, March 19, 2011

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

I haven't reached out to you in a few months, but I wanted to let you know that The Fresh Air Fund is again in need of host families for this summer. If you could help get the word out on fathersrights09 it would really help us place these wonderful children into a loving host family for up to two weeks of a fresh air experience they will never forget. I've put together a new social media release, so please feel free to use any of the images, graphics, banners, or copy:

Sunday, March 13, 2011

It’s been said many times that men are results-driven and women are process-driven. And in my years as a Family Law attorney I would say this is never more apparent than in the arena of divorce court ­ usually to the disadvantage of the man. Most men are bottom-line creature: They want to get it over with as quickly as possible and move on, whereas most women consider the process and strategize accordingly.

The mistake most men make is they don’t strategize about how to protect themselves in a divorce. And many are shocked to learn that the woman they are divorcing is not the woman they married. In the beginning it was all bliss and Bundt cakes, but in the end it’s a land grab ­ whether the “land” is a home, money or the children.

Men think that if they put any effort into protecting themselves during a marriage with pre-divorce planning that it increases the likelihood of a divorce. Just last week I gave the manager at my gym a free copy of one of my divorce books for men and he refused to read it. His reasoning? “I don’t want to attract a divorce.”

This willful blindness on the man’s part is frequently why they get taken advantage of and make short-sighted decisions during a divorce. For instance, when it comes to property division, some men want out of the marriage so badly they are willing to give up more of the community property in order to buy their freedom. Others think they can buy peace by giving her everything she asks for and that she'll return the favor with the child custody. What men don’t realize is that their spouse probably has a rock-solid strategy for the child custody phase that she won’t deviate from.

I had one client who paid off his wife’s credit card debt before filing for divorce. His thinking was that if he was a “good guy” she wouldn't contest child custody and support. The reality was that his attempt had no bearing on his wife’s strategy at all. What he should have done was to pay off his credit card debt, meet with an attorney, and figure out how he was going to maximize his child custody and visitation time.

Male clients often come to me with what they think is the correct division of the money but haven’t acknowledged how important the step-by-step process is for many women. Frequently they want to make an offer based on assets and debts they’ve listed on the back of an envelope and expect their soon-to-be ex-wife to believe that it is an accurate representation of their assets. Oddly enough, soon-to-be ex-wives don’t trust their soon-to-be ex-husbands that much.

Many men want to avoid the emotions that come with divorce by throwing themselves into figuring out the division of the assets. This is particularly true in cases where there is a family business like a small retail store or a restaurant. In one case, my client handed me a manila folder that detailed all the family’s assets and debts from the restaurant they jointly owned. He expected me to convince his wife that this was true and accurate inventory of all that they owned. That didn't happen even though he was spot on with the numbers. He didn’t understand that the process was important to his wife. She needed to be 100 percent sure about the numbers, which created a mountain of paperwork for him to validate his claim.

The difference in expectations for men and women extends to the children as well. Most of the men I represent care far less about the money, and far more about their children, than their soon-to-be-ex-wives believe. The men come in thinking that they are entitled to 50 percent custody of their children and don’t see why they shouldn't get it. I have to sit them down and explain the realities of joint custody such as school schedules, extra-curricular activities, logistics of transportation and the fact that they, being employed, must continue to earn the same amount of money. In other words, quitting their jobs and becoming the stay at home dad is not in the cards.

While more couples are working towards creating a positive co-parenting framework, that doesn’t mean it will work for everyone. I have a client who is on the road 5 days a week and refused to believe that the judge wouldn’t give him 50 percent custody. His solution to spending so much time on the road was that he’d just hire a nanny. I had to drill in to him that no judge is giving him 50 percent custody so that a nanny can raise his children while he’s away.

It is the rare case where a man will walk in to my office prepared to successfully navigate the tumultuous waters of divorce, alimony and custody. And that lack of preparation is why they are at such a disadvantage when they are served the Summons and Petition [USA terminology]. They haven’t been talking to their friends about what to do, when to do it, and how to secure the best relationship with their children. But they can be certain that their wives have, because, again, it’s part of the process.

Until men realize that they are in a situation that demands preparation and strategy, they will continue to be frustrated and end up with less.

The steps to strategize are like the steps to winning a Super Bowl ring. They need to read the playbook to learn about the game, and determine the plays they’ll be calling. They need to know their opponent’s strengths and weaknesses, and finally they need to prepare, prepare, prepare.

While divorce isn’t a game, it can be a battle. And without the right kind of preparation, what invariably happens is that men enter in to that battle with a pea shooter while their spouse is armed with a bazooka. And all that’s left at that point it to play “Taps.”

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David T. Pisarra’s books A Man’s Guide to Divorce Strategy and A Man’s Guide to Child Custody are available on Amazon.com and as an ebook from his website, www.MensFamilyLaw.com

Saturday, March 5, 2011

After reading this I am saddened that both my children's court appointed lawyers lied to the court continually for years so they could cash in on the insidious family court gravy train. How can filthy lying lawyers like Chris Robertson and Adrienne Edwards sleep at night after receiving blood money? RIP mum. They enjoy the persecution of the paternal family when it's all based on false allegations. These scum sucking pricks don't care about the child's feelings, as these creeps create PAS and unnecessary heartbreak for thousands of kiwi kids!